Love/Hate…
Perhaps not the most tactically clever lead-in to a post referencing next year’s ‘The Architecture of Japan’. Non-tactical but true. I have a love-hate kind of thing going on with Japan or more exactly with Japanese objects of beauty. That much intentional beauty is thrilling on an almost physical level. On the other hand, I can get antsy around so much restrained gorgeousness.
Bonsai make for a convenient example here. I saw my first bonsai on a family trip to California during the now long ago ‘68 summer of love. Seeing them honestly made me feel like some kind of new door had opened up in me. Not just a new-to-me pretty thing but a whole new way of being beautiful.
They also seemed in their own way simple. Plant. Pot. Dirt. This magic might be replicable even by a particularly impulsive twelve-year-old. At the time my attention span would probably have had a hard time safely sustaining a daisy over the course of a season. Bonsai age is, of course, measured not in seasons or even years but in decades. Not surprisingly my first attempts--ultimately my only attempts--at creating bonsai--ended soon and badly. Not just with dead trees but ones that had all the hallmarks of torture.
Honestly, to my adult self all bonsai have at least a hint of torture. Can’t a poor tree be left alone to grow as it will? No wires. No clipped roots. No twisted limbs. If you want the pleasures of a wind-swept tree can you please just go outside? And yet…and yet…they are so beautiful.
The uncomfortable truth is the lure remains as strong as ever. Because they always have this thing. This very Japanese thing of wabi sabi. Loosely translated wabi means ‘austere beauty’ while sabi means ‘with the ‘patina of age’. And I am and always will be a sucker for wabi sabi of all sorts and in all places.
I think the tension I feel is partly personal. The impulsive twelve-year-old still walks these inner halls drawn to the beauty while incensed by such complete order. I suspect it is also cultural. I am an American through and through. Surely a kind of knock-about exuberance courses through our collective cultural veins. A ‘let’s stir things up and see what happens next’ impulse that if not always serving well then certainly tending towards the lively.
Ironic it may be but in the end I can think of no better reason to visit Japan. To get to know its beauty more thoroughly. To increase my tolerance for its profound aesthetic perfection. To be an American who has seen some things beyond her shores and returned home with a larger sense of the ways of this world.